August 11 2023, marked the year Netherland black metal band Urfaust released their final album, Untergang. On an Instagram post, they slapped on a minimal #goodbye hashtag, and I can only assume the Untergang album successfully summoned an otherworldly, impenetrable force and has been absorbed into a pan-dimensional void that binds.
A simple goodbye, and what has been left is a masterpiece of sonic deliciousness that embraces a macabre and melancholic atmosphere.
Untergang encapsulates a dark umami flavoured doom, injected with psychedelia, occultism and our bleak black metal elements of harshness. Except this is not your everyday black metal. Urfaust reshapes their sonic landscape in Untergang in an everlasting hypnotic loop of despair and unfamiliarity and is true to the ethos and perennial vein of black metal, being extreme and innovative.
The album consists of disembodied vocals, with a mix that promotes sensations of this voice being omnipresent.
High-gained, distorted guitars form shapeless, chromatic drones in a void-filled loop.
Spectral synths are layered isotopically and the drums scaffold structure to what would otherwise be an otherworldly pastiche of despair.
Every track on Untergang wrestles with forces that eventually fuse together the harshness of the guitars and the glacial vocals. Although the vast soundscape seems unknowable, tracks like Vernichtung are made into familiar form with looping melodies and recognisable beats. Hollenkosmos’ stark minimal drumbeats set a canvas for bleak sonic emersion.
While Urfaust traverses the unknowable void that binds, they have left clues as to the nature of the boundless space and time through Untergang. It provides a masterpiece reminder to us that black metal is still an innovative genre that prompts us to feel our condition as subjects in what is largely an inhospitable and unknowable universe.
Urfaust: Facebook
Release Year: 2023
Label: Van Records
Category: Album
Country: Netherlands
Reviewed by Aidan MacNaughton
